The 9 dimensions of super resilience: the key to enjoying mounting uncertainties

Would you agree that for most people, life and work have become a lot more demanding and uncertain in recent years? And is that trend likely to grow in future? If so, what’s the positive response to the challenge? This is what I’m calling super-resilience.

Currently, I see many individuals, communities and work teams struggling to cope at their current skill level. If we want to enjoy these undertainties, as well as survive them, we’ll need a major upgrade in our skills and resilience. So let’s review nine dimensions of super-resilience, and how you could explore them.

Super-Resilience for who?

My exploration of this topic is through the Seeding our Future project which I am funding and leading. Our aim is to understand the likely pressures and upsides of the years ahead, gather or create best practice in super-resilience, identify where innovation is needed, and find ways to share all this with our target client groups: individuals, communities, and front-line work teams: such as health, voluntary sector, and other public services.

Super-Resilience to what?

This is a key question. The UK Government has done a lot of work on resilience, but defined narrowly as responding to sudden emergencies: natural disasters, terrorist attacks and so on. These are significant stresses, and sadly they’re growing, but there are many others, and new ones ahead in the future. Here’s a short list:

A 10–20-year outlook

Think of significant increased pressures in the past 5-10 years, and imagine them increasing a lot further:

  • More frequent and extreme weather events.
  • Pandemics and similar health crises.
  • Rises in food prices, and supply shortages.
  • Continued rise in authoritarian governments and right-wing populism.
  • Political and economic disruption through cyber-attacks.
  • Substantial growth in refugee and migrant movements.
  • Major and minor terrorist attacks in developed countries.
  • Further rise in income disparities and the wealth of the uber rich.
  • Ongoing cuts in public services, leading to significant problems

Now add some new pressures:

  • Frequent cyber-disruption of daily activities (banking, social media, mobile phone use).
  • Growing power of AI amplifies many of the pressures listed here.
  • The ‘culture of cuts’ leads to a significant rise in disruption from strikes, walkouts, and protest actions, by both workers and service users (e.g. NHS patients, commuters).
  • Growth in extremism, erosion of social norms and stability, further limits on civil liberty.
  • The NHS have to make major policy decisions on priorities, e.g. cease life-extending treatments for anyone over 80.
  • Dominance of social media and fake news erodes personal connections and community cohesion.
  • Technological innovations become more radical, pervasive, domineering, driven by big business profit-seeking.
  • More to come…

Nine Dimensions of super-resilience

In Seeding our Future, we are exploring nine dimensions, each described in more detail in the following sections.

  • Deep Adaptation: facing the shock: the foundational step of feeling and learning to live with difficult feelings like shock, fear, grief.
  • Emotional resilience: raising ability to find joy and build on positives; processing stress and negative feelings; handling conflict; deepening emotional support.
  • Soul resilience: finding clarity and direction in challenges; growing through any sense of helplessness and despair, seeing a bigger perspective.
  • Physical health: including help from diet, exercise, complementary medicine, etc.
  • Practical resilience for individuals: including home, phone, transport, food and utility supplies.
  • Practical resilience for front-line service teams: avoiding burnout, dealing with funding cuts, and handling rising client demands and service failures.
  • Practical resilience for local communities: shared resources and services, mutual support, handling emergencies.
  • Managing technology: tailoring it to real human needs, and handling its pressures.
  • Nourishing imagination and creativity: as individuals and groups, raise our scope to envision and create positive change.
  1. Deep Adaptation – facing the shock

The DA approach, initiated by Jem Bendell, has many elements, and I don’t agree with all of them. But I fully share Jem’s view that the foundational step in meeting the crises of our times is to face, feel, and work through the painful emotions they arouse: such as fear, grief, anger, guilt, overwhelm. It’s easy to get into apathy, denial, or blaming, but they won’t move us forward constructively.

I also share Jem’s view that the best way to process these painful feelings is to voice them and feel witnessed in a supportive group. Joanna Macy’s Work that Reconnects is a great way to do this, and I’ve seen its benefit many times: for an overview, see my blog. As she says, the aim is not to discard such emotions, but to learn to live and act with them. For my overview blog on Deep Adaptation, click here.

  1. Emotional resilience

It’s clear that the stresses and complexities of modern life, including its technologies, put more emotional strain on us. The book Your Brain on Nature cites medical research showing how hours with smartphones and computers keep us in a continual state of anxiety and make it hard to relax: see my blog on the book here.

There are many methods already available to develop emotional super-resilience: the obstacles are people’s willingness to use them, and a need to offer them in more accessible forms. Here are some examples:

  • Ways to grow through intense feelings such as grief, fear, e.g. the Work that Reconnects and grief tending.
  • Mindfulness, NLP and other ways to process negative emotions.
  • Assertiveness, Non-Violent Communication, and other approaches to handle difficult feelings and conflicts between people.
  • Time in nature as a key antidote to the stresses of ‘screen world’. Some GPs now write ‘green prescriptions’.
  • Try out the ‘composting‘ process I have created.
  • Methods to clear the trauma many people now feel, such as Transformational Resilience:see blog here.

There’s also great scope for innovation, such as:

  • Use of smart, micro, personalised technology, like a stress monitor that intervenes with help when you’re upset.
  • Widespread use of sound, aromas, images, etc., as quick ways to calm individuals and groups.
  • Deeper integration of physical remedies (diet, herbs, exercise, etc) with emotional support.

I now have several years’ experience of working with colleagues to lead resilience programmes, especially for individuals and front-line services. A key element of these has been learning in a natural environment, and using Nature as a role model of resilience: most of these programmes have been held at Hazel Hill Wood, the 70-acre woodland centre I set up near Salisbury. See more here.

  1. Soul resilience

As life gets more challenging physically and emotionally, connecting with our soul can help us find a sense of purpose, meaning, and connection to the bigger picture. This is getting more crucial because of growing trends which can leave us feeling alone and overwhelmed in an apparently nasty, pointless world: the deluge of bad news, the shift from personal contacts to hours alone with a screen, and media telling us we’re alone and vulnerable, unless we buy more stuff.

For me, soul is my essence or higher self, and I believe that it lives through many human lifetimes, and has chosen this life with me for positive reasons, which I need to figure out. You could call this a spiritual approach, but it’s possible to have a spiritual path without any belief in God or connection to established religions. It’s worth saying that many research studies show that having spiritual values and practices of some kind does increase resilience generally, and physical health and recovery in particular.

All the worries of recent years, from global to personal, push me into despair most weeks. One way I recover is to talk with my soul, asking why am I here, how can I learn, grow, be of service. You could do this through meditation. For me, prayer helps: calling on some higher wisdom, such as a spiritual teacher like Jesus, Kwan Yin, Buddha.

Here are some specific approaches which I use, which you could check out:

  • The writings of American eco-philosopher Thomas Berry, who highlights the importance of dreams (visions of hope), and of changing our myths or prevailing beliefs. He highlights the amazing creative wisdom of Gaia, Planet Earth, in evolving through repeated crises, and the need for humans to align and connect with this. See my overview blog here.
  • Sufi teachings which see divinity in all life, not in an individual God figure, and focus on love, joy and open-heartedness. See more here.
  • Spiritual ecology involves using deeper ways to learn from Nature, and in Nature. Processes connecting us with the wildness and wisdom of Nature can be a powerful source of insights and healing. See more at workingwithoneness.org.
  • See more of the teachings I draw on at my website: soulresilience.net.
  1. Physical health

It’s clear that our bodies were not designed for the lifestyle most of us lead, and the rise in stress-related illness is alarming. According to the HSE (Health & Safety Executive), in 2024/25 stress accounted for over 51% of all work-related health cases. It’s also very clear that emotional concerns are causing physical health problems, and raising resilience on other dimensions can help hugely with our physical wellbeing.

The know-how available to help us create physical super-resilience is huge, and it’s now quite easy to tailor this to any individual’s condition and needs. Diet and exercise are the obvious starting points, but sustaining super-resilience is likely to require sophisticated help from complementary therapies, for example:

  • Herbal remedies and supplements.
  • Shiatsu, Pilates, kundalini yoga, and other ways to help the body process ongoing stress and sustain high energy levels.
  • Sound healing, aromatherapy, and methods to achieve deep relaxation despite high stress.
  • Greater understanding and better antidotes to physical stressors such as air or water pollution, electromagnetic radiation and others.
  1. Practical resilience for individuals

Over the next decade, more interruptions to basic services like mobile phones, electric power, internet, are very likely. Why? Causes could include severe weather, cyber-hacking, disruption to satellite systems, and more. Food shortages and major food price inflation, service cuts, economic downturn are a few of the potential issues.

The sensible steps could include: a stock of basic food, a backup power-system and getting to know your neighbours. Super-resilience could include all this and more, for example new, robust technologies for the home, local food processing technology, etc. The UK Government advice on emergency preparation is pretty basic, but here’s a link. You’ll find lots of good advice online.

  1. Practical resilience for local communities

Think about the pressures which local communities have had to face over the past ten years: public service cuts, floods, riots, and more. My guesses about super-resilience for future challenges include:

  • Methods to maintain communication locally if phones stop working. Maybe a new technology, or old: remember walkie-talkies and notice boards?
  • A deeper level of coordination to identify resources and the people who would need most help in an emergency.
  • Further growth in local communities providing services and shared facilities for themselves as local authorities and others cut back, and professional skills, funding sources, etc. to enable this.
  • Ways for communities to nourish their members on the emotional and spiritual levels, to deepen general resilience.
  • Raising the skill levels of community leaders and members in handling conflict, crisis, and uncertainty.
  • Figuring out how to involve more members of communities: often it’s a minority of usual suspects.

You can see plenty of relevant resources and blogs on the Community Resilience section of www.seedingourfuture.org.uk.

  1. Practical resilience for front-line service teams

I’ve been leading resilience training with people from a wide range of front-line public services: most of them feel close to burnout, and demoralised by the future outlook. This comment is typical: from a team manager in an NHS hospital, “we’ve had years of rising demands and shrinking resources. It’s reached a stage where the quality and resilience is being ground out of my team. There’s a high risk of staff burnout and service failures, and the future outlook is literally unthinkable.” Here are some guesses at what super-resilience may mean here:

  • Mutual support:the best front-line teams I’ve seen have an outstanding quality of mutual care. There are ways that this could be deepened even more: for example through emotional intelligence and inspirational resilience.
  • Pass-back to clients:one of the big stressors on front-line services is the rising number, severity and complexity of client needs they are trying to serve. I believe that ‘pass-back’ will become crucial in future: spelling out to clients the limits of the service they can expect, and providing them with information and support to do more for themselves.
  • Handling service failures:these are likely to get more frequent and severe in future, and part of super-resilience will be the ability of service teams to live with such failures, and even grow through them.
  • Vision and direction:a team who are inspired can work wonders. Super-resilience will benefit if teams are empowered with a greater say in the vision and direction of their work.
  1. Managing technology

When do you date the start of technology? Whether you choose the spinning jenny, the motor car, the computer, it’s always been a curse and a boon. Often it raises the speed and complexity of life, and hence our stress levels. There are dramatic changes already happening: for example, pervasive use of AI, robotics, biotechnology, and more. AI and other technologies are rapidly becoming indispensable, and are already massively manipulating human feelings and behaviour. See more in this blog.

The risk is clearly that most of this technology will be used to boost corporate profits, whatever it may claim, and will deplete our resilience more than helping. The scope to harness technology as an aid to super-resilience is huge, but if you follow the money, it’s unlikely to happen: the immediate challenge is to avoid humanity simply being run by the technology.

  1. Nourishing imagination and creativity

This might sound merely a nice idea, but it’s a lot more fundamental. We’re in an era where our ability to think outside the box, to conceive of positive futures, is being squeezed out. Rob Hopkins, founder of Transition Network, describes this problem and the reasons for it eloquently in his recent book, From What Is To What If. Creative capacity is being eroded in our personal skill sets, and by lack of support for it in work organisations, education and more.

This is another situation where we need to choose our reality, exercise these talents, and encourage them in communities and groups. Both the climate crisis and covid increase the risk of us seeing only limitations and worries ahead. Positive change has to be conceived, envisioned, before it can start to happen! For resources on co-creativity, see here.

Want to know more:

www.seedingourfuture.org.uk: this website gives details of pilot projects, resources and more for personal resilience, community resilience, food security, etc.

www.soulresilience.net: ways to grow your inner strength through soul connection.

www.naturalhappiness.net: for details of Alan’s model of wellbeing and resilience based on natural systems, and signup for Alan’s monthly e-newsletter.

The future is already here, if you know where to look for it.